LEAH GARCHIK'S PERSONALS

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, August 7, 1996

NEW MAIN RACKS UP SOME STATS

The New Main Library in San Francisco, open since April 18, will greet its millionth visitor today.

Cultural institutions are not, of course, in competition with each other, but the folks who run the library can't help noticing that the Museum of Modern Art took 15 months to reach the same number. Also, more people have visited the library in the past four months than attended Giants games all last season. Furthermore:

-- Average daily attendance is three times what it was at the Old Main; 9,000 compared with 3,000.

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-- The library has already issued as many cards as the Old Main would have in a year.

The millionth visitor, expected at about 11 a.m. today, will be presented with an array of prizes.

HOW TO WIN VOTES ON TV

Total TV asked some experts for advice for Bill Clinton and Bob Dole "about how they should use television in their campaigns." A few responses:

"I would tell Bill Clinton to do a guest spot on 'Friends,' " said Chris Rock of Comedy Central's "Indecision '96." "Then I would explain to Bob Dole exactly what a television is."

"Clinton always shoots up in the polls after he has spoken at a funeral," said Mark Russell of PBS, "so he should blitz the airwaves with his eulogy reruns. Since Dole gives the appearance of the funeral being his own, he should be televised only with his wife and dog as he answers questions put to him by his campaign manager."

"I would hope," said Sally Jessy Raphael, "they have people on their staff brighter than I to advise them how to use TV."

WHEN BOOKS-OF-THE-MONTH BEGAN TALKING DIRTY

In a letter to the New Yorker about accounts of Ernest Hemingway's conversations with editor Maxwell Perkins about foul language, editor Simon Michael Bessie recalls his work on John Cheever's first novel, "The Wapshot Chronicle," in the '50s.

Bessie was "thrilled," he writes, to receive word from the Book-of-the-Month Club that the work had been selected, but dismayed when the Club told him that Cheever would have to remove the F-word from the book, "as it had never sent its members a book containing that word."

The editor contacted the author and asked him to make the change, but Cheever refused, saying it was the only appropriate word for the bedroom scene in which it had been used.

In the end, chief editor Ralph Thompson relented, creating literary history, the first time "a Book-of-the-Month club selection would go out with that word in it."

DIFFERENT STROKES FOR LITERARY FOLKS

Responding to recent outlines of synchronized swimming routines suggested by literature, reported in the New York Review of Books and repeated herein, Rod Ottinger of San Francisco came up with one of his own:

"Proustomania: While the corps de ballet presents its narrative of 'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu,' one lone swimmer at the side expresses the solitary nature of artistic creation, exquisitely demonstrating the difficulties of social commentary for one who is a neurotic agoraphobic."

Is there anyone else out there who has a suggestion for a synchronized swimming routine based on a work of literature or another art form? Send it to Leah Garchik, S.F. Chronicle, 901 Mission St., San Francisco, Calif. 94103, or e-mail address below.

-- WHO SAID WHAT

"The decade that started off with a grudge -- the '90s were going to be anything but the '80s -- has become the decade without a clue. Look around. Nothing adds up anymore. Everything we know is wrong. The economy spits out new jobs, yet no one feels secure. Recycling, we're being told, is a waste of time and money. Out West, loggers are hugging trees and environmentalists are hugging loggers. Eggs no longer raise your cholesterol. Minneapolis has a higher murder rate than New York. . . . We're confused. Dazed, too. We used to think the center couldn't hold. All of a sudden, there doesn't seem to be a center at all."

Will Dana, who needs some cheering up, in Rolling Stone magazine.

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